


hello, welcome home

by CrimsonPetrichor



Category: Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fluff, Romance, also featuring my obligatory slate of literary references, the entire Decathlon squad is here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-29
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-09 23:11:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15278274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrimsonPetrichor/pseuds/CrimsonPetrichor
Summary: “I know that you’re technically the literature expert here,” Cindy says. “But we’ve all seen the way you two look at each other during Decathlon, and that right there is some Jane Austen shit.”Peter and Michelle and six confessions of love. (Well, sort of.)





	hello, welcome home

**Author's Note:**

> I may have a Spotify playlist that's titled "[sings] gaaaaaaaaarbaaaaage" that's just schmoopy romantic songs and I may have listened to it too many times on repeat while trying to figure out how to cope with Infinity War through fics and this may be the product of that questionable choice.
> 
> The title is from "lovely" by Billie Eilish and Khalid, which doesn't make an appearance on the playlist, but like, what was I going to do, title this with a Sixpence None the Richer lyric and become a parody of myself?

i.

Two months into captaining the Decathlon team and Michelle finally feels like she’s getting the hang of things that came so easily to Liz. She’s figured out the best way to switch off drill partners (twice a meeting, using a musical chairs configuration), how to motivate the team to show up to weekend meetings (doughnuts), and how to convince Abe to stop honing his AcaDec-specific comedy routine during practice (he gets two jokes per session, only one if he’s using the buzzer for comedic effect.) The skill that she’s proudest of, though, is knowing exactly when to end practice, regardless of whether they’ve just started or been running practice rounds for ninety minutes.

Today, barely half an hour into the meeting, she’s ready to call it. Cindy keeps gritting her teeth whenever she fumbles a question, gripping her index cards so tightly that her knuckles are white, and Michelle’s not really sure they’ll survive for much longer. Seymour gets the formula for Ammonium wrong and snaps, _“Who cares?”_ when he’s corrected, making Mr. Harrington gasp like he’s been personally insulted. Even Flash’s bravado seems to have failed him, leaving him to just shrug when he gets an answer wrong.

And then there’s Peter Parker.

Or, to be more accurate, there isn’t Peter Parker. In spite of her asking him to please just show up to practice this one time so he can compete on Saturday, he’s nowhere to be found. She’s annoyed that it disappoints her this much — not even Liz could get Peter to show up to practice regularly, and Liz’s superpower is being so nice that people just do whatever she asks. Michelle tells herself that she’s frustrated because Peter’s their chemistry expert and the team they’re facing on Saturday seems to have six chemistry experts, but she’s pretty certain their team can handle it. It’s the not-knowing that’s getting on her nerves.

(She tried to get an answer out of Ned, but all she got when she asked about Peter was fifteen seconds of panic eyes followed by, “Uh...a meeting?”

It was such a poorly delivered lie that she couldn’t even bring herself to call him on it.)

Between the missing teammates and her mounting suspicion that they’re all losing knowledge the longer they sit in here, there’s no salvaging this practice. Michelle presses the button on her timer to make it ring like it doesn’t still have nine minutes and thirty-eight seconds left on the clock and tells everybody to pack up their stuff. “I’m too tired to run these drills today,” she says. “Sorry, everyone. I promise I’ll be like, forty percent less zombified by Saturday.”

The whole room seems to sigh with relief.

“Don’t worry about it, MJ,” Cindy says, smiling at her. “I don’t think any of us were having a very good day.”

“That new freshman is at the dentist, though, so he’s probably having more fun than we did in that last lightning round,” Flash says as he shoves his papers into his bag.

(Ordinarily, Michelle would argue with that, but honestly, he’s not wrong.)

The team files out of the room, talking amongst themselves in a buzz that’s upbeat enough to assure her that there won’t be a mutiny by the end of the month. Michelle watches them go, then waves out Mr. Harrington before she goes to erase the board and gather up her papers.

It’s quiet and she goes about the work in peace for about a minute before she hears footsteps pounding down the hallway and turns to the door just in time to see Peter skidding into the room.

“I’m so sorry I’m late!” he’s saying to her before he even looks up. “I got- wait, where is everyone?”

“Gone,” Michelle says, tucking her charts into a folder. “Practice is over, Parker.”

He looks down at the phone in his hand and then up at the clock hanging on the wall. “But we still have half an hour left.”

“Executive decision,” she says. “So feel free to go back to being a...hitman? Drug dealer? Secret popstar? Whatever it is you do. Your afternoon just opened up.” Then, in case he gets any ideas about continuing this conversation, she moves to the ring of desks in the center of the room and starts dragging the nearest one back into place.

Of course, because it’s Peter, she immediately hears a backpack drop on the floor and then he’s beside her, carrying a desk in each arm with surprising ease.

“I really did try to get here on time,” he says as he pulls two chairs over. “I just...I got sidetracked and I had to-”

“Peter! How was your meeting?” Ned calls from the doorway, loud enough to make them both jump.

“What? I mean, yeah. Good. Good meeting. I was in a meeting.” He says this last part to her, as if it clarifies anything.

“Yeah,” says Ned. “Like I said before. A big, important meeting and he couldn’t get out of it so…”

Peter nods emphatically, and Michelle looks from one to the other. “In a meeting,” she repeats, and this time both of them nod. “Okay. With who?”

Silence.

“Shouldn’t that be ‘whom’?” Ned says when Peter doesn’t immediately answer.

Michelle rolls her eyes. “Fine. With _whom_ , then?”

“Uh, it was...it was for the internship,” Peter says slowly. “Yeah, for the Stark internship, you know? Kind of hard to explain.”

“I thought you lost the Stark internship.”

Peter’s answering laugh is strangled. “What? No, no, of course not. I didn’t lose the Stark internship, ‘cause if I did, then what have I been doing for all this time, right? But I didn’t lose it!” he says, a little too loudly. Beside them, Ned winces and Peter lowers his voice to a normal register. “I didn’t lose it and I’m still, you know, doing work and having meetings for it and- oh, is that the time? May’s waiting for me, so I should probably head out.”

“Parker, what are you even-”

He’s already halfway out the door, calling to her over his shoulder in an increasingly hard-to-hear voice. “Wish I could talk but I’m gonna be late, _thanksloveyoubye_!”

She turns to Ned, eyebrows raised, but he’s already backing away. “I should go, too. Can’t miss my ride home.”

“You both take the subway!” Michelle shouts after Ned.

“Safety in numbers!” he shouts back, and then she’s alone.

 

* * *

 ii.

Given how their last school-sanctioned outing was cut off by half the universe blipping out of existence, it’s kind of impressive that Midtown has made exactly no changes to its field trip schedule as the new school year begins.

(“Law of averages,” Michelle hears Ms. Warren say as they board the bus. “If the world ends again, I’m more likely to disappear this time and then at least I don’t have to go through all that paperwork.”)

Just like every other year, the first week of October sees the Advanced Bio and Comparative Ecology students packed off onto buses and sent to the Bronx Zoo, ostensibly to fill out worksheets answering questions about the exhibits but mostly to meander around the zoo for six solid hours with the barest amount of supervision.

Michelle had sort of expected the trip to go the way it did last year, with her roaming the exhibits alone, finishing her sheet early, and then holing up in the aviary to read until it was time to leave. She even brought along a book for the occasion.

Instead, though, after the teachers have set them loose and everyone takes off in different directions, Cindy looks over from where she stands with a handful of Decathlon kids and asks, “You coming, MJ?”

Her first thought is that it’d be weird to say no.

Her second thought is that she doesn’t actually want to say no.

Four exhibits later, they’re searching for somewhere to have lunch when the conversation takes a turn that makes Michelle kind of wish she’d just been weird and said no.

“It’s hopeless,” Cindy is saying as they all head down a flight of stairs. “This is what happens when you go to a school full of nerds. Everyone is either too awkward to think about dating or too smart to want to be awkward while dating.”

“Exactly!” says Seymour, whose in-crisis personal life had kicked off the conversation to begin with. “Now imagine that you’re me and your potential dating pool is twelve guys in total.” He pauses for a second, then shakes his head. “Actually, no, it’s eleven guys, because I was thinking about asking Peter Parker to Spring Formal back in April, but he and MJ still have their- you know, _thing_ and I can’t get in the middle of that.”

Michelle looks over at Cindy and Betty, hoping to share an exasperated glance with them, but instead they both just hum in agreement. “I’m sorry,” she chokes out. “ _What?_ ”

“I know that was weird. I’m sorry I brought it up,” Seymour says, wincing. “We should move on.”

“No,” she says. “No, no, no no no no. You don’t have to apologize for bringing anything up and we don’t have to move on from anything because there’s nothing between me and Peter. There is no thing.”

“Okay, but there’s a little bit of a thing,” Betty says. “Right? Maybe it’s not romantic or whatever but like...whatever there is between you two, it’s different somehow.”

“You did say no seven times,” Seymour adds helpfully. “That seems extreme if there’s really nothing happening.”

Betty nods. “Exactly. The lady doth-”

Michelle narrows her eyes. “If you finish quoting _Hamlet_ right now, I’m throwing this entire bag of caramel corn into the pond.”

“Fine,” Betty says, sighing. “But it’s true and you know it.”

“Cindy,” Michelle says, “any time you want to chime in with a dose of reality, that’d be, you know, great.” But the girl in question just kind of shrugs, and Michelle groans. “Not you, too.”

“I’m sorry!” Cindy says. “It’s just that...okay, I know you’re the literature expert here, but we’ve all seen the way you guys look at each other in Decathlon when you think the other person isn’t looking and honestly, MJ, that right there is some Jane Austen shit.”

She wonders how drastic it would be for her to throw herself into the hippo habitat to escape this conversation. She could make a life in the mud, she thinks, and the hippos would probably get used to her after a while. “Seymour, ask Peter out whenever you want to,” she says, hoping she sounds more breezy than defensive. “Just know that he’ll probably be super late to your date and you deserve better than that.”

In all likelihood, this wouldn’t be the end of the conversation, except that suddenly there’s a loud, metallic-sounding crash somewhere up ahead and they all stop in their tracks.

“What was-” Michelle starts to ask, but then another crash sounds, followed quickly by screams, and her feet start moving of their own accord.

“Why are you walking _towards_ the danger?” Seymour hisses. “Shouldn’t we take cover here?”

Michelle just gestures impatiently for them to follow, but no one does. She sighs. “Normally, that would be a great idea, but we’re by the bear enclosures right now. I know those walls are high, but if we’re going to be anywhere near agitated animals while our lives are already in danger, I’d prefer that they were birds and not killing machines.”

“She has a point,” Betty says. “We just need to go down to that last landing. There are trash cans and benches we can hide behind to wait it out.”

“Stay close to the walls,” Michelle says. “And stay quiet.”

They edge their way down the stairs, towards the marshes and the noise, and hunker down behind the benches. Michelle tucks herself behind a trash can and peers over the top, trying to see what’s happening.

“Do you see anyone?” Cindy asks. “Are they still out there?”

“Looks like there are some people behind the ice cream cart, and I think that’s Flash hiding behind the bank of recycling bins. I can see his new sneakers.”

“No blood, though, right? Nobody’s hurt, or-”

“No. Everyone seems f- what the _fuck_ is that?”

Betty and Cindy and Seymour all pop up from behind the bench, straining to get a look at what Michelle is seeing: someone — or something — covered head to toe in body armor tinted blue-ish green, with a mask that looks like the head of a wolf.

There’s a _thwip_ noise and suddenly a bench goes swinging towards the blue wolf thing, but it doesn’t trip him up for a second. He bats the wrought iron away like it’s a rubber ball, and someone screams, _“Spider-Man, look out!”_

Half a second later, he appears in Michelle’s line of sight, flinching a little as the bench crashes into the spot where he stood a second ago. He straightens up again, ready to take on the wolf-man, but the wolf has his back to Spider-Man now, advancing instead on the island of trash cans where the warning was shouted from.

The other three are standing beside her now, Michelle realizes, as one of them gasps and another grips her shoulder in a panic.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Seymour is whispering. “He’s gonna kill them.”

Michelle isn’t sure how to comfort him, because she’s thinking the same thing. “Spider-Man’s gonna do something. He’ll think of something. He always does,” she says, imbuing her voice with a confidence she doesn’t feel.

They watch for a moment as the wolf-man advances slowly, calling out taunts. For a second, Michelle thinks that maybe she should close her eyes, but something in her feels like whatever happens, this should be witnessed.

From where they’re watching, the four of them huddle closer together, like maybe that will make what they’re seeing more bearable, but just as Michelle is starting to maybe revise her stance on witnessing this, a familiar voice echoes across the zoo courtyard and she sighs with relief.

“Hey, Budget Balrog!” Spider-Man calls out. “Comic Con was _last_ weekend.”

Michelle furrows her eyebrows, so surprised that she forgets to be scared. "Did he just say 'Balrog'?" she asks the others.

Seymour shushes her.

"No, seriously," she whispers. "Did he?"

Cindy nods distractedly, eyes fixed on the confrontation in front of them.

"Oh my God, is Spider-Man a Tolkien nerd?"

"We might die and _that's_ what you're focused on?" Betty hisses.

The wolf-man whirls around to face Spider-Man again, just in time for a large boulder to come flying at him from one side and a picnic table from the other. Mud goes flying everywhere as the boulder swings on its web, but there’s no pretending that it isn’t completely satisfying when it makes contact with the man in the wolf suit.

It doesn’t pin him like Michelle thought it might, but it does tear his attention away from the bystanders: as soon as he gets up, he makes a run for Spider-Man, who seems to have seen it coming because he’s already webbing his way along using trees and lamp posts, leading the wolf-man to the thicket of woods at the southwestern corner of the zoo.

They give it two minutes, then five minutes, then ten, but the sound of the fight never comes back their way. Ms Warren is the first to stagger out from behind the trash cans, looking around frantically. “Kids?” she calls out. “Get down here so I can do a headcount.”

Faces start to appear one by one, from behind benches and overturned picnic tables and ice cream carts. Michelle and the other three make their way down the last flight of steps and Betty uses the vantage point to start her own headcount.

“Is everyone okay?” Ms Warren is asking. “Anybody hurt? Text the people you don’t see here so we can find out where they are.”

“Anybody seen Leeds and Parker?” Michelle asks, looking around. “Where did they go?”

“Monorail, I think,” Abe says, helping a vaguely familiar sophomore to her feet. “They wanted to take it when there was no line.”

Her eyes widen. “Are you sure? You’re sure they’re on the monorail?”

“They should be. When I saw them half an hour ago they were the next group to board.”

Heart sinking, Michelle looks in the direction of the monorail: the southwest corner of the zoo, where Spider-Man led the wolf. She pulls her phone out and unlocks it as fast as she can, typing what she’s sure is an error ridden text to both Ned and Peter asking if they’re okay.

Abe and the others huddle around her phone screen to watch for a reply, leaning in closer when the three dots appear and then sighing in relief when Ned replies, _‘Fine!!! both fine!!! Spidey fought the wolfy dude on top of the train but we’re ok. he took off for the woods.’_

As soon as it becomes clear that the danger is gone, everyone focuses back on what’s really important: “Spider-Man fought that guy on top of the train? That’s so badass,” Cindy says. “Do you guys think there’s video?”

The conversation descends into debate over whether the zoo will let them see the security footage or if they’ll just have to hack into it. The class seems pretty evenly split on the issue, actually, though when Peter and Ned rejoin them, the scales tip towards hacking rather than politely asking. Ms Warren would usually reprimand them for this sort of thing, but Michelle’s pretty sure she’s too glad that they’re all unhurt to ask more questions.

“Guys,” Betty says, “where’s Flash?”

They start to look around for him, but his voice immediately comes from behind the recycling bins. “I’m fine,” he calls out. “I’m absolutely fucking dandy.”

“Eugene!” says Ms Warren, but as Flash stands up, all she can do is press her lips together and shake her head to keep from laughing.

He’s covered head-to-toe in the mud, all except for his new sneakers, which have somehow remained pristine. “If Spider-Man is such a tactical badass,” Flash says, “why couldn’t he have drawn that freak to the monorail five minutes earlier?”

Cindy reaches over and delicately pulls what looks like a large dragonfly out of the mud in Flash’s hair and Michelle does her level best to not burst into laughter. She can’t look at Ned, because he’s doing the same, and if they look at each other, they’re both going to lose it.

(You would think that Peter would relish this, but instead he just pulls off his sweatshirt and offers it to Flash. It’s annoying sometimes, how nice Peter is.)

Michelle tilts her head up to look at the sky and tips a half-salute to nothing. “Spider-Man,” she says, as solemnly as she can muster, “if you’re out there, binch, I love you.”

Ms Warren lets out a cackle before she can stop herself, then claps a hand to her mouth, but it's already too late. The giggles spread within seconds, some strange combination of actual humor and hysterical relief at still being alive. Even Flash lets out a snort, although he tries to cover it a second later by scoffing at her.

It doesn't matter. She still has every intention of being a little smug about this.

 

* * *

 iii.

It’s Cindy’s fault, Michelle decides, if she fails English this semester.

In all her other classes, there’s work to do and there are notes to take and ultimately there are a million things grabbing at her attention, so she has less time to drift. English, though...you can only study so much for English. You can only take so many notes. At some point, the drifting becomes inevitable.

This wasn’t such a problem before, since Michelle was forever reading ahead anyway. Doodling was a good way to keep her hands busy that didn’t use all of her brainpower, and she never seemed to get asked a question that she wasn’t prepared for.

It’s been a week since their field trip to the zoo, though, and Michelle can now say with authority that drifting in English class has become a problem.

She can’t stop thinking about what Cindy said, about how she and Peter supposedly look at each other all the time, and now she gets self conscious every time she even glances in the vague direction of Peter’s assigned seat.

It shouldn’t have gotten under her skin the way it did, Michelle thinks. Whatever it is that Betty and Seymour are confusing for some weird, amorphous ‘thing’ of attraction is just intellectual curiosity. Michelle’s always had an excess of it, and now it just so happens that its focus is Peter Parker. It has very little to do with how cute he is and everything to do with the way that he mysteriously disappears from places all the time, or constantly shows up late to things with the worst possible excuses, or so frequently walks in with injuries that he blames on running into doors that he makes a compelling case for a literal world without walls.

It’s not like Michelle is oblivious to basic facts. She knows Peter is attractive. It would be silly to pretend otherwise. She also knows that he’s a good friend, and although he flakes out a lot on her and Ned, he always tries to make up for it as soon as he can.

But that’s nothing. That just makes Peter a friend of hers who happens to be undeniably good looking. He’s not her one true love; he’s just a puzzle that she’s trying to solve. Is it really so hard to accept that idea just because his t-shirts happen to hang nicely off his shoulders? Is it an absolute truth of the universe that the floofy curls in Peter’s hair are powerful enough to make everyone want to date him?

At what point does-

“Michelle?”

She snaps her head up to look at Ms Kapoor, who’s looking down at her expectantly. “I- sorry. I was just, uh, reading ahead. Got carried away.”

“Oh, that’s perfect,” says Ms Kapoor. “Then perhaps you’d like to read Beatrice for us, since you’re already familiar.”

Michelle blinks. “That wasn’t a question, was it?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, then.”

Ms Kapoor claps her hands together. “Great! Now, this scene is like a verbal tennis match, so we need a Benedick who can keep up with our Beatrice.” She pauses to scan the classroom for the single raised hand in the bunch. “Very subversive, Betty. I like where your head’s at, but you did just read for Hero, so let’s give somebody else a shot. How about- Mr Parker! I love a volunteer. Thank you.”

Michelle whirls around to look at Peter, a few rows back and two seats to the left of her, but his eyes are fixed on his book.

“Now, we know from the performance clips we’ve seen that this scene gets played in every possible way: dramatic, slapstick, angry. Just go with what feels right to you, and the rest of you pay attention to how it affects the meaning of the dialogue. Lines 269 to 297, please.”

There’s a flutter of pages as everyone tries to find the right place to start.

“Lady Beatrice,” Peter begins after a moment, “have you wept all this while?”

In spite of their teacher’s instructions, Peter reads his lines straight from the book while Michelle recites hers mechanically from memory. She might have made like, five percent more of an effort on another day or with another scene, but right now all she can think of is the exchange that she knows is coming up in a few lines.

It shouldn’t mean anything to her.

It doesn’t mean anything to her.

This is just a basic high school English rite of passage: last week, Ned and Flash read the balcony scene together, and neither one of them came out of it suddenly in love with the other. It means nothing that Peter volunteered, either. He probably was just trying to do her a favor.

He’s probably never even read the scene before today, Michelle thinks, before reciting, “It is a man’s office, but not yours.”

She gets her answer a second later, as Peter starts to read his response and then breaks off two words in with an “oh” of realization that kind of makes Michelle wish she could dissolve into dust again. There are muffled giggles around the classroom, and even Ms Kapoor looks like she’s trying not to laugh.

Peter recovers quickly, though, and maybe he’s just trying to make up for messing up the reading, but this time when he delivers the line, he’s not just reading it off the page. “I do love nothing in the world so well as you,” he says, and his voice may be softer than before, but she can hear the smile in it even with her back to him. “Is not that strange?”

And no matter how logically she’s thought this through, or how much genuine curiosity she has about him, there is no denying the swoop in her stomach when she hears him say it.

Luckily, the total and complete panic unleashed by this reaction makes for a particularly true to life performance of Beatrice’s next few lines. If Michelle believed that the universe wasn’t too preoccupied to engage in the torture of a random high schooler, she’d swear that this was a giant cosmic joke.

They finally make it to the end of the passage, and while Michelle is desperate to be done, she loves the play enough to know that her last line should be afforded a little weight. She fights her impulse to blaze right through it, instead pausing to let Benedick’s words hang in the air for another second.

It’s a good test, she tells herself. If she can just get through this line without being affected by it, she can be certain that all the weird fluttering behind her ribcage was more from the iambic pentameter than from Peter’s delivery.

Though she still delivers the line to her book and not to a person, her tone softens of its own accord. “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”

Ms Kapoor claps for them and as the class follows, Michelle chances a glance back at Peter only to find that he’s already looking at her. He offers a small smile and a shrug when he sees her looking, then quickly glances away.

(His ears, she notices, are slightly pink, but that’s probably unrelated.)

 

* * *

 iv. 

“So he told you after the bite?”

Ned shakes his head. “Nah, he told me at the beginning of last year. He crawled into the room on the ceiling when I was there and then he tried to tell me the suit was just a costume instead of the real thing.”

She lets out a laugh. “Typical.”

“I know,” Ned says. “But I think he was just trying to protect me. May found out pretty much the same way, too, like right after the thing with Liz’s dad.”

“But that was all last year,” Michelle says, furrowing her eyebrows. “And the OsCorp trip was the year before that. So he just...kept half of his life secret? From everyone? For an entire year?”

Ned shrugs. “I think he thought he had to,” he says, like it’s that simple, and maybe for him and Peter it is.

Michelle still has about a million other questions — did OsCorp engineer those spiders for a reason, how does Tony Stark come into all this, is Peter seeing a therapist because he definitely should be — but the car slows to a stop and she looks out the window to find that all that Upstate farmland has given way to a shiny, hyper-modern complex of buildings. She thinks she’s doing a pretty good job of taking it all in until Ned opens his door to step out and she sees, just beyond him, a launchpad with a literal jet on it.

“Tony Stark,” she says half to herself, “has too damn much money.”

The driver snorts and she suddenly remembers that she’s not actually alone in the car, so she thanks him and jumps out to follow Ned inside.

She’s not sure if she was expecting teleportation beams or costumes displayed in the foyer, but for the headquarters of the Avengers, the facility is actually pretty bland. It’s cold, the way that office-y buildings always seem to be, and all of the walls are glass panels, which feels like the wrong choice for a secret superhero facility. There’s a receptionist at the front desk who doesn’t even give her and Ned a second look, waving them both inside.

They walk into a hallway that’s just a series of doors, but Ned seems to know where he’s going, opening the third one on the left and heading down the stairs without hesitation. Michelle follows him, wondering just how often Peter has gotten himself severely injured for Ned to instinctively know how to end up in the medical wing. She adds it to her mental list of questions to ask when she gets the chance.

They hang one last right and then push through a set of double doors into a cheerily lit hallway that smells like antiseptic and coffee.

May is sitting in a chair, scrolling through something on her phone. She jumps up as they enter and first sweeps Ned and then Michelle into tight hugs.

“I’m so sorry you had to find out like this,” she says, holding Michelle by the shoulders to get a better look. “You’re okay, right? Because we can get you looked over if you want, or you can lie down and rest a little if today’s been too much to handle, or-”

“How’s Peter?” Michelle blurts.

“He’s fine,” May says with a tired smile. “No lasting damage and nothing the nurses here couldn’t handle. He’ll take a day or two to fully heal.”

“A _day_? They dropped a building on him, May; it’s not like he bumped his head.”

“Advanced healing factor,” Ned explains, shrugging. “Come through, radioactive spider.”

Michelle blinks. “Oh.”

Ned turns to May. “So is he awake? Can we go see him?”

“Yes, you can see him and yes, he’s awake,” May says. “But we ran into a little problem earlier when we were trying to give him painkillers. He kept metabolizing them too fast for them to work, so Dr Cho cooked something up and it’s working, but he’s a little- uh, _loopy_ right now.”

“Loopy,” Michelle repeats, eyebrows raised.

May sighs. “Okay, fine, he’s super high. I feel like a bad aunt every time I say it, but it’s full on Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds in there. Just be warned.”

For Michelle, this warning means that she should take the things that Peter says with a grain of salt. For Ned, this warning apparently means ‘have your camera out and set to video mode so you can start recording the second you step into the room’.

“I missed you guys!” Peter calls out as soon as they enter. His voice echoes up into the high ceiling of the room and he cringes. “Wow, that was loud. I missed you guys,” he says again, dropping his voice to a stage whisper.

He’s paler than usual and there are bruises running up his arms, but everything looks halfway healed, like it all happened three weeks ago instead of this morning.

“We missed you, too, Pete,” Ned says, crossing over to the bed. “How are you feeling?”

Peter sighs. “Bored,” he says, very seriously. “It’s really gray here. Look at these walls. Why doesn’t Mr Stark hire someone to paint them? Or do murals! Like the one by the library! You remember that one, Ned, with the whale and the moon? That was so cool! What happened to it?”

“It’s still there, dude. We saw it last week.”

“Oh. Good.”

“Yeah, buddy.”

“Is it always like this?” Michelle asks from the foot of the bed.

“It’s never like this,” Ned says, grinning at her. “So I’m recording it. For science.”

Peter looks up as they’re talking and gasps like he’s only just noticed Michelle. The smile that he gives her is devastating, utter sunshine and delirium, and for a second she forgets how to speak.

“MJ!” he calls out, still beaming. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you, Parker. I heard you got hurt and I was, uh- I was worried.”

His voice is full of awe. “You were worried? About me?”

From behind his phone, Ned snickers and is rewarded with a glare from Michelle. “Of course I was worried about you, loser,” she says, but it comes out far gentler than she means it to.

“Well, I’m okay,” Peter says. “Are you okay?”

She furrows her eyebrows and looks over at Ned, who shrugs. “Me? Yeah, Parker. I’m fine.”

“That’s good,” he says seriously. “I was worried about you.”

“What, just MJ?” Ned asks. “You weren’t worried about me? That’s cold, Peter.”

“Ned,” Peter says patiently, “I don’t need to worry about you. Or May. ‘Cause you guys already know.”

Ned angles his phone to get a better shot of Peter’s face before asking, “Know about what, dude?”

“That I’m Spider-Man! I mean,” he drops his voice to a whisper, “that I’m Spider-Man.”

Michelle and Ned share a look before Ned turns back to Peter. “Why don’t you want MJ to know that you’re Spider-Man?”

Peter shrugs. “She’s gonna be mad that I lied, and then she’s not gonna be around anymore. I like having her around.”

“We know, dude,” Ned says, and Michelle lets herself smile a little.

But Peter just shakes his head. “No, really, Ned. I love having her around. She’s the best.”

Ned looks from Peter to her and back and she’s not sure she likes what his expression is saying. “I thought I was the best,” he says.

“You are the best,” Peter says. “And so’s May. But MJ...she’s _MJ_.”

Grinning, Ned starts to turn the camera from Peter to Michelle, but she shakes her head furiously and he lets his hands drop. He tilts his head at her, confused, but she just shakes her head again, backing her way towards the door.

Peter is high out of his mind, she tells herself firmly. He’s basically just an affectionate drunk girl right now, and the things that he’s saying mean nothing. Nothing, she tells herself again. Absolutely nothing.

Ned is still looking at her with concern, but Peter doesn’t seem to notice that anything is off.

“Mr. Stark should get MJ to paint murals here,” he says, looking around the room like he’s seeing it for the first time. “She could make it beautiful.” He leans conspiratorially towards Ned and says, not quietly enough, “She makes everything beautiful.”

Michelle panics and leaves the room before she can hear anything else.

It is not, all in all, her proudest moment.

 

* * *

v. 

It’s not until Andre Braugher yells, “Hot damn!” onscreen and the horns of the theme song kick in that Michelle realizes she’s been staring at Peter’s profile for an embarrassingly long time. She snaps her gaze back to the computer in front of them, looking sidelong at Peter as she tries to figure out whether he’s noticed.

This has been happening a lot lately: she looks at Peter because she can now, without getting defensive or awkward or justifying to herself that it’s for yet another sketch of a person in crisis. She’s allowed to like looking at him just for the sake of it, and she’s still getting used to that. She’s still getting used to a lot of things, she thinks, her eyes falling on the Spider-Man mask on his desk.

(She should note, for posterity’s sake, that he looks at her, too, but whenever she catches him at it now, he just grins at her and then somehow she’s the one who ends up blushing. It would be frustrating if it didn’t make her feel so damn fluttery every time.)

Michelle flops backwards onto the bed, staring up at the slats of the top bunk like they’re as interesting to her as Peter’s cheekbones had been a minute ago. Her face is warm and her pulse is thudding, but she is emphatically not turning red, and she will continue to not turn red just as long as she keeps staring at these bed slats, which is a totally normal thing to be doing right now.

She doesn’t look away until the sound cuts out and she hears the soft click of the computer closing. When she does chance a look over at him, he’s leaning over to tuck the laptop under the bed so it doesn’t get stepped on. Such a nerd, she thinks, shaking her head, and she’s about to make a comment to that effect when something catches her eye down by the foot of the top bunk. She sits up and leans over to get a better look at what turns out to be a manila folder with a neatly-typed label on the front: _‘Letters: Spider-Man’_.

“Uh, Parker?”

“Yeah?”

She points to the folder where it’s peeking out from between the slats. “Are you secretly running, like, a Dear-Abby-style advice column as your alter-ego?”

She’s expecting embarrassment or evasion, but instead, Peter just grins at her. “Actually,” he says, “it’s way better than that.”

He doesn’t wait for her response before he retrieves the folder, lifting up the mattress and settling it back into place without the slightest hint of strain.

She gives him a patented Skeptical MJ Look as she takes the folder from his hands. “If this thing turns out to be your screenplay for a Spider-Man biopic, this moment is my supervillain origin story.”

But he just smiles, so she hesitantly opens it to find not a screenplay, but drawing upon drawing of Spider-Man, some in marker, some in crayon, some in paint. Some have notes written in blocky handwriting, others have signatures, and at least one has macaroni pieces glued to it.

It seems like he might start bouncing with excitement at any moment, so even though she thinks she already knows, she asks, “What is this?”

“So, uh, apparently some kids write letters? To superheroes? Like, the way you’d write a letter to Santa,” Peter says. “And I don’t know where the Santa letters go, but letters for superheroes all get redirected to Stark Industries. Tony said Pepper set it up with the postal service after the Battle of New York. I guess they figured that’s the best way to get something to an Avenger, so then when I showed up and they started getting letters for me, they sent them there, too.”

“And this is what they’ve gotten so far?”

He ducks his head. “Not exactly. These are just the ones from, uh- from this month.”

She raises her eyebrows, letting out a laugh. “Shit, Parker. You’re famous.”

“ _Spider-Man_ is famous,” Peter says. “I’m just me.”

“You know what, I can hear you fishing for me to tell you that there’s nothing ‘just’ about you, and that kind of cheesy crap is really beneath you,” she says, bumping her shoulder against his.

He laughs at that, loud and warm. “Guess I’ll just have to think of something else, then.”

“I’m sure you will,” says Michelle, before turning back to the letters. “So do you reply to all of these?”

“Some of them,” Peter says. “A lot of kids just write to say hi or thank you. But I’m trying to be more organized about it because sometimes kids write to Spider-Man to ask for help.”

“Help?” she repeats. “But what would they- _oh_.”

It makes sense, she thinks, that a kid would choose Spider-Man for that. Iron Man and Cap are giants, too important for anything less than flying aliens, but Spider-Man? Spider-Man rescues stuffed animals from crowded intersections. Spider-Man would have time for them.

When she looks at him again, he’s staring down at his hands. “Yeah. Yeah, I- I mean, sometimes it’s things that I can do, you know? Like walking a kid to the bus stop, or tracking down a lost pet. But not always. May helps, though,” he adds, brightening. “She usually knows who we can talk to, and then we get Tony to pull some strings with the right people when we need to, and so far it’s worked out okay.”

He says it so simply, like he’s talking about giving someone directions or stopping someone from stealing a bike. She wishes, suddenly, that she could take all of this evidence to the useless congressmen who keep trying to make superheroes illegal. They get to sit there and close their eyes and pretend that all of their systems work while the seventeen year old they keep trying to arrest runs around catching all of the kids who fall through the cracks.

It overwhelms her sometimes, how much he cares. She has no clue how it is that he can bear it, but the fact that he does sparks something up in her chest, something warm and bright and with a name that it is way too soon to say, so instead Michelle just scoots closer to him and slips her free hand into his. When he finally looks back up at her, she says, “You’re a really good person, you know that?”

Peter just shrugs and laughs a little, brushing it off, but he raises their joined hands to kiss hers, so she takes that as a thank you.

“Um, also,” she says slowly, “if you ever need help getting through these letters, I would...not say no if you asked for my help. Neither would Ned.”

“I know,” he says, pressing another kiss to her hand. She runs her thumb along his knuckles a few times and watches as he lets his eyes close, the tense set of his shoulders relaxing.

“Do you, though?” Michelle asks. “I know you’d do anything for the people you care about, and we don’t have Spidey senses or accelerated healing or the ability to Tarzan across the city, but there’s not a lot we wouldn’t do for you, either.” She pauses for a moment, then adds, “Even if you are a weird nerd who still won’t let me try on the suit.”

His eyes fly open again, wide and panicked. “It’s- I- of course you can’t try on the suit; it’s dangerous,” Peter sputters. “What if someone saw you in it and thought you were Spider-Man?”

She laughs. “In your _room_ , Peter? Who exactly would see me wearing the suit in your room?”

This, as it turns out, is the wrong thing to say. It initiates what she can only call a short circuit: Peter freezes, blinking rapidly as his ears go a very impressive bright red.

“Fine,” she says, taking pity on him. “I won’t try on the suit.”

“Thank you,” he says, his voice still a little strained.

Michelle shrugs. “I’ll just buy one on ebay for Halloween this year.”

(She’s probably committed to doing it now, she realizes, but given the look on his face, it’ll be worth the twenty dollars just to see how wide his eyes go.)

 

* * *

 vi. 

August in Queens is mostly miserable — muggy and vaguely garbage-scented and with the kind of unrelenting sun that makes you miss the bare eight hours of daylight that happen in the wintertime. August evenings, though, are a mostly-different story. The temperature drops, the sky goes a pretty purple color, and all the pastries at the best bakery on Austin Street go on sale as soon as the clock hits five.

So really, it makes perfect sense the first time she shows up at the Parkers’ door with a bag full of cookies, an old blanket, and an exceedingly well-curated playlist. It’s not a Pinterest-y picnic; it just happens to be the most practical way to go on a date if you’re a broke high schooler whose boyfriend may need to dash off at any given moment to fight crime.

The lawn chair is May’s donation to their cause, because the roof is apparently permanently carpeted with leaves from the nearby trees and therefore slightly gross to sit on. They even get free entertainment: Forest Hills Stadium is across the street and plays host to weekly concerts. They’re not all easy to hear from the roof — Peter swung them over so they could watch Flight of the Conchords and last week Hans Zimmer conducted an orchestra in rain so heavy she’s not sure they heard the music inside the stadium either — but mostly they’re just content with the slightly muffled sound and each other’s company.

Janelle Monáe is playing tonight, and as the crowd roars its approval of the next song, Michelle sits up a little straighter, straining to hear what’s being said over the noise of the crowd. When it doesn’t work, she turns to Peter. “Make yourself useful, Spidey,” she says, poking him in the arm. “What song is this?”

“I’m starting to feel very used,” Peter says, but he straightens up anyway, listening closely with a furrowed brow for a few seconds. “Uh, she just said ‘smash, smash, bang, bang’? And then the crowd repeated after her?”

“Oh, that’s Dance Apocalyptic. I love this song.”

“We can swing over, if you want,” he offers. “It’s dark enough that no one will see us.”

Peter even starts to get up, but Michelle pulls him back down to the lawn chair. “Nope. This is the most comfortable this terrible chair has been all summer and I’m not moving. We’ve earned this.” She tucks his arm back around her and drops her head onto his chest, pinning him in place.

“Are you choosing my company over Janelle Monáe? Because if you are, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me.”

Michelle huffs and rolls her eyes, although she doesn’t bother to lift her head and look at him. “I’m choosing this sort of comfortable seat over those super uncomfortable seats. The rest of this equation is just incidental.”

“You’re totally choosing me over Janelle Monáe. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

She reaches up and flicks him on the arm. “You’re the worst.”

“I get that a lot,” he says. “I mean, usually from criminal masterminds, but still.”

“What makes you think I’m not a criminal mastermind?”

“If you were any kind of bad guy, you’d obviously be a supervillain,” Peter says, tripping his fingers up and down her arm. “When you’re a mastermind, you order a bunch of lackeys around. When you’re a supervillain, you do the big stuff yourself, and you would prefer that.”

“Oh my God, you’ve actually thought about this,” Michelle laughs.

“Patrolling is 90% just waiting for bad things to happen. What else do I do with my time?”

“Alright, nerd. I know you came up with the details so now you have to tell me. What would my power be and how would I use it?”

“Okay, I don’t have that much free time on patrols. Give me a little credit.”

“Peter.”

He sighs. “Okay, fine. You’d call yourself Aequitas, and you’d have a truth lasso like Wonder Woman, except you’d use it to compel crooked politicians to confess to their corruption.”

“I mean, this sounds pretty heroic so far.”

“...and then your gimmick would be the ‘blind justice’ thing, so you’d have a blindfold and you’d let the politicians go after they confessed and then you’d shoot them with a bow and arrow.”

“Peter, what the hell, that’s so dark.”

“I mean, we did say supervillain. If it was just you as an anti-hero, it’d stop at the confession thing.”

Michelle furrows her eyebrows. “Wait, isn’t aequitas Latin for justice? You don’t even take Latin. Did you look that up just for my theoretical supervillain persona?”

“You can’t be a supervillain without a cool name,” Peter says with a shrug. “That’s why Ultron was a disaster. He sounded like a Transformer.”

“And yet you almost led a mutiny in Decathlon last year when I said the team should study basic Latin to increase our collective knowledge base,” she says flatly.

“Can you imagine telling thirty new freshmen that they were going to have to learn a third language just to participate in our club? They would have all ditched us for robotics and the matheletes.”

“That is...actually a decent point,” Michelle says. “Why didn’t you bring that up last year?”

“Oh, that was during that period after you found out about the Spidey thing and before we got together where you kept running out of rooms as soon as I walked in,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Once, you couldn’t get to the door so you just hid behind Betty, except she’s shorter than you and Abe kept trying to ask you questions, so it didn’t really work.”

“Bold of you to assume that I’ve forgotten a single crushingly embarrassing second of that entire month.”

He laughs. “I don’t know if _you_ can really say ‘crushingly embarrassing’ when I’m the one who was high on pain meds and rambled for twenty minutes on camera about how pretty you are.”

“Fine, we’re both disasters. Happy?”

“Yeah, I am,” he says, and it’s gross and really sweet and she’s about to lean over and kiss him when both of their phones go off with an alert.

Peter groans and reaches for his while Michelle untangles herself from him and grabs the mask and webshooters from the bag beside her.

“Jewelry store robbery on Continental,” he reads, slapping the shooters onto his wrists. “If I hurry I can catch them before the cops lose the trail. I’m really sorry, MJ, I promise I’ll make it up to-”

“Peter, it’s okay. Go save the city,” she says. “I’m gonna finish all your ice cream and marathon _Brooklyn Nine-Nine_ until you get back.”

He laughs, looking at her for a moment the way that she always used to look at him when she was trying to figure him out. “Hey, MJ?”

“Yes, nerd?”

“I love you.”

“I get that a lot,” she says lightly, like the words don’t immediately make her heart stutter.

He laughs and shakes his head, unbothered by the fact that she didn’t immediately say it back. “Not from criminal masterminds, I hope.”

“Jealous, Parker?”

“Only if one of them has an equally luxurious rooftop where you can sort of hear concerts and sit on a broken lawn chair,” he says. “If not, then I think we’re good.” He pulls down his mask as he turns to head for the edge of the roof.

She watches him go for a moment, chewing on her lower lip, then calls out, “Hey, Peter!” before she can stop herself.

He whirls around to look at her. “Yeah?”

“I love you, too.”

It’s impossible to miss the grin in his voice as he says, “I’ll see you soon, I promise.”

Michelle watches as he swings off the building, on to the next and the one after that until he disappears into the dark, and then she’s alone on a rooftop and she can’t stop smiling to herself.

It’s entirely possible, she decides as she heads down the stairs, that Cindy was right all those months ago.

It’s entirely possible that this thing she has with Peter is some banter-filled, love-requited, companionship-of-equals Jane Austen shit, and she can’t even find it in her to be vaguely annoyed about it.

“Gross,” she says to herself, absolutely not meaning it.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! As ever, if you're so inclined, please let me know what you thought.


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